In this interview, David Foster Wallace reads from his essay, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" and discusses his week long experience on that cruise on Wisconsin Public Radio.
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"For seven days and seven nights in mid-March of 1995, David Foster Wallace took a cruise.
He did not have a very good time.
The results of the voyage are recorded in “Shipping Out,” an extended essay, framed playfully as an ad for a cruise ship, that ran in Harper’s in early 1996. (It was later re-titled “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and set as the anchor to Wallace’s 1998 essay collection of the same name.)
What makes “Shipping Out” such a fantastic specimen of literary journalism is how insistently un-literary it is. It is not delicate; it is not subtle. Wallace, given his remarkable talents, could easily have Shown Not Told and Onion-Peeled and Sublimated his way through the story, suggesting, through the intricacy of his diction and the elasticity of his prose, all the little ironies and oddities that a Seven-Night Caribbean Cruise (line: Celebrity; class: Luxury) might convey. He could have made the cruise a metaphor - for death, for life, for capitalism, for colonialism, for America - and called it a day. (Or seven.)
Had “Shipping Out” been written by someone else - had it been written, actually, by anyone else - the result would probably have been a perfectly lovely magazine essay embodying the kind of rhetorical doubling that perfectly lovely magazine essays tend to strive for: on the one hand a travelogue with a transformative narrative arc and appropriately Dickensian details…and on the other a cultural critique of the m.v. Zenith, its curiosities, its context, and the various Global Phenomena it represents: economic entitlement, imperative leisure, people who use “cruise” as a verb.
But Wallace isn’t just a writer. He is a philosopher with a writer’s imagination. And “Shipping Out,” despite its lyricism (“I have felt the full, clothy weight of a subtropical sky”), is an argument whose poetry and provocations orbit around a single point: “There’s something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad.” A thesis Wallace will prove through taxonomic considerations of ship-borne sorrows, through vignettes conveying both humanity and the absence of it, through rhythmic repetitions of the word “despair,” through inventories of assorted atrocities that have, in the topsy-turvy moral terrain of the Seven-Night Caribbean Cruise, adopted the guise of Mandatory Fun."
-- niemanstoryboard.org/stories/w...
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18 янв 2016
